Hasta La Gadget!

We saw a leaked hint of what was coming for Intel’s Valleyview system-on-a-chip (SoC), but now the full plan appears to have been outed by Chinese blog Expreview. The lineup will feature four models of the 22nm chips, with the D- and M-series looking to replace the Cedar Trail 32nm SoC chips used in current netbook and low-end desktop devices. The I-series is for embedded and industrial use, while the T-series would appear in tablets and other small form-factor devices, according to the leaked slides. That model would supersede the Clover Trail SoCs, which are only just arriving themselves in upcoming Windows 8 slates like the Acer W510 or Asus Tablet 810.

The chips should offer a burly horsepower bump over their predecessors, with up to four cores and clock speeds topping out at 2.4Ghz. The icing on the cake will be the integrated Gen 7 graphics engines of Ivy Bridge fame, featuring the same HD 4000 and HD 2500 GPU‘s as the grownup chips, but with only four “execution units” instead of the 16 you’d find there. That would offload functions like video decoding and 3D rendering from the CPU and allow simultaneous display to a TV or monitor. Bay Trail would also support 8GB of DDR3 RAM, double that of the “last” gen, as well as USB 3.0, SATA 2.0 and a host of other connection options. If the leak is accurate, the processors would arrive sometime next year, we’ll just have to wait and see if that’s soon enough for Intel to take a run at its formidable competition.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablets

Intel’s full Atom ‘Bay Trail’ roadmap leaked: 22nm, Ivy Bridge graphics, quad-core originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 08:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Ars Technica  |  Expreview (translated)  | Email this | Comments

When it comes to technology and the end of a financial quarter, you can bet your wage there’ll be an analyst report or two letting you what’s what. And according to Gartner’s latest estimates for Western Europe, PCs didn’t fare too well in Q2 of this year, with a 2.4 percent decrease in shipments compared with the same period in 2011. Consignments of mobile PCs (read: not tablets) grew by 4 percent, while desktops floundered, dropping 12.8 percent. Of this, a minor growth of 0.4 percent was recorded in consumer PCs, while the professional market decreased by 5.3 percent. Among the big hitters, HP remained at the top of the pile despite losing some market share, and Acer remained in second position with a mild increase in the same. ASUS put in a healthy performance, moving the company up to bronze medal position, while Dell dropped off the podium to fourth. The vendor statistics for the whole region were echoed in France in Germany, but during the quarter Apple managed to break into the top five in the UK market. Meike Escherich, principal analyst at Gartner, attributes the overall performance to economic uncertainty in the region, as well as lackluster demand in the wait for Windows 8 machines. We don’t want to spoil all the fun, so a comprehensive breakdown of the numbers awaits you at the source link.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Gartner reports Western Europe desktop shipments down, portable PCs up in Q2 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TechCrunch  |  Gartner  | Email this | Comments

Netbooks – do people still use them? I guess the answer would be “Yes”, although a resounding one it is not. The Acer TravelMate B113 is the latest netbook from the Taiwanese computer manufacturing company, where it will come along with an 11.6″ display alongside an Intel Celeron B877 processor – definitely not the fastest chip on the block by far, but it offers decent levels of performance for its product category. This particular netbook is also said to be a wee bit heavier compared to your regular netbook, but it will lack a DVD drive which some of us find essential. Unfortunately, you can strike the TravelMate B113 out of the Ultrabook list, as it fails to make the grade in terms of thickness.

Basically, some folks think that the Acer TravelMate B113 is a device that is in no man’s land. It is no Ultrabook, has less battery life than a regular netbook, and lacks an optical disc drive that notebooks come with. I guess it will be an extremely niche market for someone to fork out around $700 (max) for this puppy, where it will feature 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, Wi-Fi and USB 3.0 connectivity, and HDMI support. You can opt for the more souped up versions of that feature a 1.3GHz Pentium B967 or a Core i3-2377M that runs at 1.5GHz.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Acer Aspire One 725 ready to rock and roll, Acer Aspire One D270 netbook up for pre-order,

The Compaq Mini CQ10-688nr comes with a 10.1-inch screen and 1024 x 600 resolution. It packs an Intel Atom N455 CPU at 1.66GHz, a 250GB HDD and it has 1GB of DDR3 RAM. There’s also a VGA resolution webcam for video chatting, WiFi and a media card reader.

If you’re into LTE you can expect to see download speeds in the 5-12Mbps range and uploads around 2 to 5Mbps. The Compaq Mini CQ10-688nr will retail for $449.99 with a new 2-year customer agreement. A monthly data plan with 2GB of monthly data is $30, 5GB of monthly data is $50, and 10GB of monthly data is $80.

[netbooknews]